How did this happen? Oh, yeah....that's right.

It happens slowly. One day you’re twenty years old and you have the whole universe before you with arms open wide and suddenly you are at a place in your life where everything stops. Everything. Just. Stops.

It doesn’t really matter how it happens and you won’t ever know when it will happen but I guarantee you it will. It’s not as subtle as a mid-life crisis and it takes many forms. It’s the day you consciously have to decide for yourself and for the people you love if you have the strength to go on and (if you do) how you are going to go about doing it.

For me it happened one Summer Saturday morning at work when my partner of 20 years had a heart attack. I will undoubtedly tell the whole story in more detail sometime but for my purpose here it’s about that moment. For me it was in the emergency room when the doctor came in to give us the results of Brennis’ EKG. The results were not yet final but the doctor began to discuss the different possibilities and the different options for treatment. As soon as he uttered the words “Heart Attack” my world stopped. I could consciously feel every part of my brain slowly tuning out of all unnecessary peripheral stimulation as I focued entirely on the possibility that Brennis had had a heart attack and what that would mean.

In an instant I processed every possibility, rational and irrational, for the particular set of circumstances in which we found ourselves. I took in the information that the doctor was giving me without listening to him. I was present in my own life like I had never been before (or since). For the first time in my life I was able to see the truth of what was important and to know within my soul that what I was living through was something that I was meant to live through and that I was precisely where I was supposed to be at that moment in time. I could feel my very soul present in my life as though it were guiding me through this moment. It calmed me and allowed me to sit quietly and not run out of the room screaming and crying.

So the question is now almost a year later what do I do with that moment and all of the moments since then and all of the lessons I have learned and still learn. Why did I experience this thing the way I did and what am I supposed to do with it. I hope we will find out together. I felt it was too important not to share.